SF for the Weekend

We spent the weekend in San Francisco cramming fun into the last weeks of summer with the kids. This weekend was for Mia. Mia’s junior year ( the last academic year) was brutal. I can’t believe how hard she works and where she found the motivation to take 4 AP classes, while being a page editor for the newspaper, Class President, and a State Qualifier in Forensics while volunteering at Good Samaritan Hospital and working at Nordstroms, and throughout that maintaining a 4.0. San Francisco shopping is one of her favorite pastime and since we left them home when we went to Chicago last week, what the heck. You never know when you might need an extra homecoming dress. Besides, it was great fun introducing my son to Chinatown, where you can but just about any illegal thing on earth from knives, swords, and fireworks to ipod clones. When I was a kid, I spent many forced weekends at my grandmother’s apartment right off of Grant Street. To fight the boredom, my mother would send me of on “time burning missions” with $5.00 to buy any worthless thing I wanted in the Chinatown shops. I suppose she thought they were toy stores or something. I spent days in those shops and practically memorized their entire inventory of grey market warez –the more illegal and dangerous the better in my young eyes. I would often come back with Skyrockets and Cherry Bombs, Steel Nun chucks and brass knuckles. We shopped, we bartered like champions, and decided our favorites were the action figure of Jesus Christ, a wireless fart machine with multiple effects that we had to buy, and an assortment of throwing stars and utility knives for tenderizing meat of course. Mark commented, “how could it be…” that the cop on the corner didn’t even care that some 8 year old was running down the street waving a full size metal samarii sword (out of the scarboard) with his mother who had apparently bought him the killer toy which brings new meaning to “running with scissors is dangerous”. I grew a little paranoid that we might be patted down as soon as we stepped out of the magic immunity protection of Chinatown.

We lucked out and managed to get a penthouse room upgrade at the Hotel. Ive always tried to upgrade but we got lucky because the LA Angels were in town playing the Giants and they hogged all the family rooms. Fate smiled on us this weekend.